I cut and tweaked yesterday's words until the synopsis fit onto five pages, double spaced. It was more about eliminating lines than words, but I wound up with something sort of cohesive. I think. As the synopsis marathon gets under way, we'll start critiquing each other's synopses, and then we'll see if it makes sense to anyone other than me. I also got a decent start on the shorter synopsis version.
In all the browsing on the internet I've done recently regarding how to write a synopsis, it seems that *the wisdom* says to start with the short version and expand it, much the way you might expand an outline into a novel. And perhaps if I were writing the synopsis before I wrote the novel, that would work for me, too. I might try it some time! But for this round, I went through the scene list and tried to condense it back, and now I'm working backwards from there. Backwards, that's me. It's one way to find the essence of the story.
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I do it backwards then, too. Of course, I barely outline as well. But I haven't written a synopsis in a while, and after all these reviews, I'll probably spit out the core of my novel in 150 words or less. :)
Hmm. I think you've hit on something helpful. Condensing someone else's story would be good practice, whether for an official review or a crit or just for, well, practice. Thanks for the tip.
For THREADS & TIES, I did the longer synopsis first. Since I had it on hand, I edited it for tense, and posted it. Then I slashed the 8 page version down to one page.
I'm doing the one page versions of TWILIGHT and PBOTL first. Since all I have is the first drafts, and cutting 300 pages down to 5 must be infinitely worse than putting together a one pager and expanding it, right? I'm not so sure, but for those two, I'm building the one pager first then expanding it out to five. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that's the right way for me to go...I'll let you know after I get it done. The more I talk about it, the more I think I could do justice in five pages, then revise down to one.
Looking forward to seeing what you do to them, Jean!
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